Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/525

Rh only by the contribution of every fact dug out by tireless and devoted research, fitted together by workers equally tireless, equally devoted. Isolated facts are of little value for the advancement of human knowledge; it is only when correlated—brought into their proper relationship to other data—that they are able to yield their full quota of aid.

For more than two thousand years speculative philosophy has dominated the schools, and in all that time has made no actual advance toward explaining the nature of man or his relationship to his environment.

Tied to the ever-varying and unverifiable personal equation, there could not be a sound basis for a worthy superstructure. It was not until Herbert Spencer, taking as the basis of his deductions those objective activities from which alone the subjective states of another can be judged, reared his splendid synthetic philosophy, which is destined to supplant all others as a system, even if every detailed deduction made by him were disproved.

If anthropology, then, comprises every department of human learning, it might seem that a university is as a whole devoted to the study of anthropology, that its various departments are branches of this one universal study. Were universities ideal institutions of learning, and had they been reared at once on a true scientific basis, this might be so. Then, again, anthropology views the details of each branch of research chiefly with reference to its bearing on the evolution and present status of man, while the active specialist as an earnest searcher for truth must wrest from the unknown each minutest fact in his own domain.

Were a university curriculum arranged on a perfect scheme of anthropological unity, the time at a student's disposal would not permit him to gain any adequate acquaintance therewith. Desirable as it might be to have a university founded on such a scheme of logical unity, yet it would fail in giving the student a complete grasp of the interdependence of all phenomena through its very multiplicity of detail.

As our universities are constituted, where is there one that has a definite curriculum so arranged that its various departments bear any true relationship to the whole, whose scheme of training is so arranged that there arises in the student's mind any conception of unity?

The very requirements for admission and the consequent training furnished by the preparatory school are based almost wholly on the old scholastic mode and Platonic cosmogony. The minor colleges, having set courses, are still controlled by the same influences. The larger colleges, having professional schools attached, and aspiring to the broader title of universities, pile all the